Co-living, a budding real-estate trend often derided as an extension of college dorm life, may be growing up.

At co-living buildings, tenants lease tiny rooms in larger apartments shared with strangers. Renters have access to living rooms, kitchens and other common spaces.

This product, which is less than 10 years old and found primarily in large U.S. cities, represents only a tiny niche in the multibillion-dollar apartment industry. But developers are now preparing to build some of the largest new co-living properties in North America, a sign that the appeal of this type of housing could be broadening.

“Co-living’s institutional moment is now upon us,” said Chris Bledsoe, co-founder and chief executive of Ollie, which also recently opened a large co-living project with 422 bedrooms. “There’s no more flying by the seat of your pants.”

San Francisco-based co-living startup Starcity last week agreed to purchase a development site in downtown San Jose where it plans to build a 750-unit co-living building. The company also intends to file plans this week for a 270-unit co-living building in SoMa, a trendy former industrial area in San Francisco, that will be half affordable housing. Starcity plans to break ground on both buildings in the first quarter of next year and open them in 2021 or earlier.

The Collective, meanwhile, has purchased a site tucked beside an elevated train line in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn to build a more than 500-unit new building for its first U.S. project. This London-based co-living developer said it has 6,500 units in the pipeline across the U.S. and Europe.

If successful, the new properties could pave the way for larger investors to enter this sector at a time when many developers are looking for alternatives to the oversupplied luxury multifamily market.

“Making it affordable to have an urban apartment will trigger demand,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president at Real Page.


https://www.wsj.com/articles/co-living-buildings-going-big-in-brooklyn-and-bay-area-1539687600

Across from Kimberly Chexnayder’s bed (which folds out from the wall) and above her flat-screen TV (which came with her small but sparkling new apartment), she’s posted a slightly faded Polaroid of her mother.

The picture was taken 30 years ago, during what her mom described as her NYC “wild days,” when she flitted between apartments, owned a record store and was friendly with Andy Warhol.

Chexnayder, a 23-year-old junior analyst for the NFL, always coveted even a small slice of her mother’s New York life. But her experience moving to the city has been far different — and easier: She pays $1,700 per month for her 152-square-foot room through co-living startup Ollie (a shortened version of the resort-reminiscent term “all-inclusive”) in Long Island City’s Alta building. The move makes her one of the hundreds of young New Yorkers, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who are turning to co-living as a solution to frustrating and expensive apartment searches.

Co-living companies aim to disrupt traditional apartment life — just as coworking spaces did for staid office life — by borrowing the concept of resource-sharing. Tenants trade personal space for a fully furnished bedroom, shared common areas and sometimes group social events, all under a prix-fixe cost structure.

Say goodbye to frantically searching Craigslist for roommates, arguing over the internet bill, running to the bodega because you ran out of toilet paper, taking trips to Ikea or playing bed-bug roulette with the couch you found on the street. Say hello to, well, life in an adult dorm. Residents still have to deal with security deposits and income requirements, but the whole experience is much less Wild West than a classic New York apartment hunt.

The trend — which some treat as a half-step between college housing and the dog-eat-dog rental market — is growing in popularity, with companies like Ollie, Common, Roomrs, WeWork’s WeLive and Dwell gobbling up square footage from East Harlem to Midwood. Advocates say co-living is the future of housing in an increasingly cramped city, allowing people to trade privacy for shared amenities, a no-chores lifestyle and fun (if chaperoned) group outings. Critics say it’s a sanitized approach to city living for the generation that trusts Silicon Valley companies to solve problems, akin to eschewing the subway to take Ubers everywhere.

Chexnayder and her mother are fans. “As much as [my mom] loves New York, I think there is still an inherent concern that raises in your mind when you think, ‘Your new college grad is just moving to the city and starting a new life,’ ” says Chexnayder. “She got really emotional when I [found Ollie]. It was just a huge sigh of relief: ‘Ugh, we found a place, we are safe.’ ”

Alta is on the higher end of the spectrum: The slick 43-story development opened last year and feels more like a hotel than a starter home. For rents ranging from $1,300 to $2,300, residents get a “microsuite” with a bed that folds into the wall to reveal a couch and mini living area, plus a shared kitchen and bathroom. Ollie, which partnered with Simon Baron Development to add its co-living spaces during construction, kitted out the units with brand-new appliances, dishware, furniture and TVs; it refills soap dispensers, drops off paper towels and offers weekly housekeeping and linen services. The building itself — a mix of rooms operated by Ollie and 297 traditional apartments — offers a full gym, a lap pool, a golf simulator, a yoga studio; a common room offers a ping-pong table and stadium seating that is set up during “Game of Thrones” and other screenings. Ollie’s studios in the building average 516 square feet.

For comparison, Chexnayder’s $1,700 room in a two-bedroom apartment on the open market might cost about $2,031, without utilities and furniture, according to data from brokerage MNS, since the average price of a two-bedroom as of March 2019 was $4,063.

The co-living idea has received its share of mockery — after all, the name sounds like a spiffy rebrand for the generic concept of “roommates.” But Ollie CEO Christopher Bledsoe says real estate developers need to break the mold to address the affordable housing crisis.

“There’s a large subset of the population that has either been priced out, or is feeling the pangs of loneliness, or is just looking or a more all-inclusive experience,” he says. Co-living companies can use economies of scale to save renters (or “members,” as some companies call them) money, since they are furnishing hundreds of rooms at a time.

Adds Bledsoe, “It’s counterintuitive, but we’re adding costs to improve affordability.”

On the other end of the spectrum is Roomrs, with 400 rooms across 130 apartments in neighborhoods such as the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights, Midwood, Bushwick, Bed-Stuy and Williamsburg. It offers fewer social events and building amenities but retains a focus on saving money for tenants.

“We think the neighborhood and the city will always be cooler than any space we can do,” says Roomrs CEO Or Goldschmidt.

Enter Ana Gonzalez-Soto, 19, who moved to the city from Texas to attend Pace University but wasn’t interested in official student housing. The city wasn’t intimidating, but apartment hunting was. “Having to go through the application process, having to furnish it. . .” she says. “Honestly, it wasn’t in my budget and I didn’t have time because I was so busy.”

The Roomrs building she found in East Harlem seemed like the perfect solution. For $1,400 a month, she shares a first-floor pad with three roommates. She quickly made her bedroom her own, adorning it with a pink color scheme, a Crosley record player and a “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” poster. “This is the perfect transition,” she says. “Going from this into real-world housing is much better than doing it straight out of the dorm or your parents’ house. It’s not as scary.”

Maybe detractors are peeved that younger people have it easier than they did. Buzzfeed’s Nitasha Tiku called co-living the “Disneyland version of startup life,” while NYU researcher Lior Zalmanson once described it as “Silicon Valley selling you living with roommates for a profit.” Still, it’s hard to feel sympathetic toward people who have long benefited from traditional rentals: fee-taking brokers and landlords who may illegally subdivide their units or force out longtime residents to command higher rents from newer tenants.

After sharing a small three-bedroom place in Bushwick, Rob Poole, 29, switched to a $1,575-a-month Crown Heights room in a co-living space run by Common. Faultfinders, Poole says, are simply romanticizing the Big Apple’s chaotic style of survival.

“I don’t think there are any New Yorkers who would complain about not having to go outside in the snow to do laundry,” he says. “When I moved here, it just kind of let me enjoy the things I care about more — running around Prospect Park, hanging out with my girlfriend.”

After living at home, 24-year-old Nicholas Gordon moved into a $1,500-a-month Ollie room in Alta. He especially enjoys the organized social events that come included with rent, such as a snowshoeing trip followed by a whiskey tasting upstate.

“They’re selling a lifestyle here,” says the Brooklyn native, who works in marketing for HBO. “Part of that is being adventurous — being open.”

Nicole Peinado, 26, ended up loving her $1,600-a-month room in a different two-bedroom Common apartment in Crown Heights because it banishes another headache: finding roommates. Common handles pairing roommates and gives residents reprieve if they don’t jive with their chosen ones.

“Just looking for a roommate was probably, for me, the most daunting thing,” she says. “If there’s an issue, you can request to transfer.”

From Chexnayder’s soundproof window at Alta, she watches the 7 and N trains roll by on elevated tracks with the 59th Street bridge in the background, a view not many twentysomething New Yorkers can afford. She travels a lot for work and can’t imagine giving up the ease of her all-inclusive microsuite any time soon.

“It’s just completely normalized in my head,” she says. “It’s one less thing to worry about when you’re constantly on the go, and you have 5 million things on your mind.”

https://nypost.com/2019/04/24/millennials-turn-to-co-living-sacrificing-privacy-for-perks/